CORRECTED-Obesity rates remain high, but stable in the U.S.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - More than a third of U.S. adults
and 17 percent of kids and teens are obese, rates that haven't
changed much in a decade, researchers say.

Only preschool-age children show signs of a turnaround, with
their obesity rates nearly halved in the same period, according
to a new federal study published in the Journal of the American
Medical Association.

"The rapid increase in obesity we saw in the '80s and '90s
has definitely slowed," epidemiologist Cynthia Ogden told
Reuters Health. "There's some glimmer of hope in the new data in
relation to the 2 to 5 year olds."

Ogden, a branch chief at the National Center for Health
Statistics in Rockville, Maryland, a division of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is lead author of the new
study.

Obesity rates among 2 to 5 year old Americans dropped from
13.9 percent to 8.4 percent between 2003 and 2012, her team
reports.

Not all the news on the national state of weight was
positive, however.

Though the overall obesity rate across all U.S. age groups
has been stable since 2003, women 60 years and older have been
growing fatter. Their rate of obesity rose from 31.5 percent to
38 percent over nine years, the study found.

Ogden and her colleagues used the annual National Health and
Nutrition Examination Surveys to examine obesity trends in
representative samples of Americans between the 2003 - 2004
survey year and 2011 - 2012.

The 5.5 percentage point drop in the obesity rate among 2 to
5 year olds mirrored decreases found among preschoolers in
previous studies, the authors write.

A report published last year, for example, found that after
doubling over 30 years, the obesity rate among low-income
preschool children fell in 19 U.S. states and territories (see
Reuters story of August 6, 2013 here: reut.rs/OuyauP).

Nonetheless, more than two-thirds of American adults and
nearly one-third of youth aged 2 to 19 years old fell into the
overweight or obese categories in 2011 - 2012.

For adults, body mass index (BMI) - a measure of weight
relative to height - defines obesity. A BMI of 25 and above is
considered overweight, and BMI of 30 or higher, which is
equivalent to a 5-foot, 9-inch adult weighing 203 pounds, is
considered obese.

For children, BMI calculations also factor-in the weights of
other kids in the same age group.

The report does not discuss reasons for the drop in
preschool obesity or the rising obesity among older women.

"There's been a lot of attention in this country on obesity,
but we've really focused on childhood obesity," Lieutenant
Commander Ashleigh May told Reuters Health.

"We're on the right track it appears with young children,
but we still have a lot of work to do," said May, an
epidemiologist in the CDC's Obesity Prevention and Control
branch in Atlanta, Georgia, who was not involved in the study.

Contributors to the downward trend among young children may
include increases in breastfeeding, decreases in sugar
consumption, a national program promoting exercise and another
that now gives low-income children more fruits and vegetables,
May said.

Dr. David Ludwig, a pediatrics and nutrition researcher at
the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, read the report
as a sign of a possible tiny step forward in the fight against
obesity.

"The key finding is that obesity prevalence throughout the
U.S. population has not changed in the last decade and remains
at historic highs," Ludwig told Reuters Health in an email.

He also cautioned that the decline in obesity rates among
preschool kids could result from chance.

"Nevertheless, if real, the lower prevalence among young
children would be an encouraging sign that national pediatric
obesity prevention efforts - though still grossly inadequate -
may be having some impact," he said.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for
Science in the Public Interest, told Reuters Health he sees the
report as a sign the obesity epidemic may have peaked.

Gains against obesity in preschool children may be
attributable to a decline in soda consumption and to adding
fruit and vegetables to the federal nutrition program for
low-income children, he said.

But Jacobson, who was not involved in the study, pointed out
longstanding disparities among ethnic groups that it reveals. A
stunning 82 percent of African-American women and 77 percent of
Hispanic women were overweight or obese, compared to 63 percent
of white women, in 2011-2012, the report finds.

"That's a real health crisis," Jacobson said. "These numbers
are crying out for some real action."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1c9i5E4 Journal of the American
Medical Association, online February 25, 2014.